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Where Microsoft Azure is pushing the technology agenda

Microsoft Azure CTO, Mark Russinovich, has mapped out the
vendor's focus on new technologies in areas such as quantum
computing, security and high performance storage.

Russinovich was in Sydney on 3 April, as the company’s
new Azure Australia Central regions in Canberra were
launched and it was announced that its local Azure regions had
gained “protected” status
from the Federal Government to handle classified and highly
sensitive public sector data.

Russinovich discussed how the company is prepared to create
mission critical infrastructure applications on top of its
platform, along with the new technologies it is now keenly
focusing on.

One particular segment involved quantum computing, with
Russinovich revealing that Microsoft is currently working on a
topological qubit, which is 100 times more stable than the kinds
of qubits companies are currently using. A qubit is a unit
of quantum information. Used in quantum computing systems, it is
the quantum analogue of the classical binary bit.

In July, Microsoft ramped up its quantum computing research
partnership with the University
of Sydney, striking a multi-year global agreement.

“What that means is we’ll be able to create quantum computers
with thousands of qubits and operate them very efficiently,”
Russinovich said.

In December, Microsoft offered up a free preview to developers of
its quantum software development kit (SDK).

“This is the way we’re getting the market ready to deliver
quantum computation. Many of our customers are already working
with us with their real world problems, and are starting to map
them on the quantum algorithm in the Q# (q-sharp) language,”
Russinovich said.

Microsoft is also working towards a goal of reducing the amount
of storage needed to store data, making it more cost effective.
Russinovich drew upon Azure Archival Storage, which is
tape-based, and said the company wasn’t entirely satisfied with
that. In turn, he discussed Microsoft's disk-based technology,
code-named Pelican.

“The reason we’re investing in this, is because tape enclosures
are fairly expensive and require special infrastructure in a data
centre, so they’re not always economical,” he said.

“What makes this unique is that there’s a few computational
servers, and the disks can’t spin up at the same time because it
will draw too much power.

"So what happens is the scheduler running inside those computers,
along with the data access that is being made, will spin up
appropriate disks and spin down other ones to keep the power
below a certain threshold. By doing this, you increase the
latency of access, but you can store massive amounts of data very
efficiently with very low power," he said.

Another area Microsoft is turning its attention is archival
storage, in a project dubbed, Silica, which uses femtosecond (one
quadrillionth of a second) lasers to store data on quartz glass.
A 25mm sheet of glass can store 50 terabytes of data with the
technology.

“What is nice about glass is that when you write something in it,
it doesn’t decay unlike tape, DVD or SSD that have be regularly
refreshed,” he said. “The reason glass hasn’t been in use until
now, is that it has been very hard to write data on glass
efficiently and if you don’t pulse the lasers in the right way,
you can cause the glass to crack.”

Another area that Russinovich touched on was trusted computing.
In September, Microsoft announced a limited preview of its
trusted ‘enclave,’ which Russinovich described as a black box
where organisations can place their data, and it remains
protected from any outside access including Microsoft themselves.

“It’s encrypted at the processor level and nothing can tamper
with it,” he said. “That data is also protected from a whole
bunch of threats. Malware that breaks out into the
infrastructure, can’t access that data and if government
authorities want access to that, while we do want to comply with
government agencies, we technically can’t provide access to that
data.

“That’s the building block for confidential computing and we’re
working on integrating that into our software services," he said.